The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  One of the hurdles was placing the tanks—not many divers in the world had the ability to stock tanks as deep as Chamber Eight, about twelve hundred yards in; another was how to know in the dark which tanks were full and which were empty. This distinction was a matter of life and death, because the diving community had become convinced that Saman Gunan had either been mistakenly given an empty tank or a tank accidentally laced with carbon monoxide. Anderson had an idea that roughly followed maritime protocol: spent tanks would be placed on the right of the cave and marked with red chem lights; full tanks would be placed on the left and tagged with green lights. Some of the chambers would look like they were adorned with a subterranean Christmas theme.

  The planning had continued into July 6, when the two Australian doctors arrived. Their mandate would be to ensure that the boys were sedated throughout. With the original estimate that only four to six of the boys would survive the journey out, survivability became critical. The Americans again hit the whiteboard, listing the ways the boys could die in the cave on the way out: drowning, if their masks came loose or became flooded; hypothermia from a weakened body’s exposure to hours of cold water; even an inadvertent bashing of their heads against rocks. They decided the boys should wear thick wet suits with hoods to avoid hypothermia, and—most crucially—that they would wear specialized positive-pressure full face masks.

  The positive-pressure full face masks would feed the boys air continuously—unlike regular masks, which provide air on demand when a diver takes a breath—to ensure the comatose boys kept breathing, and might also help purge flooded water from the mask. While the U.S. team hadn’t brought cave-diving equipment, they did bring positive-pressure full face masks—four new ones and one slightly older spare. That meant the delicate masks would each have to be brought back to Chamber Nine at the beginning of each day’s rescue.

  But there was a hitch with those masks. If a mask’s seal broke from being knocked around in those cramped tunnels, it might start to flood with water; the divers likely would not notice it as they navigated the darkened exit route. There would be no way to know whether they were towing a sedated kid who was dead to the world or a kid who was actually dead.

  Since drowning was such a major concern, Anderson and the team had an idea. Divers typically breathe regular air stuffed under great pressure into a steel tank. With the exception of those undertaking deep or complicated dives, divers simply don’t need added oxygen. Unless, of course, you’re a kid shot full of a cocktail of drugs powerful enough that someone could perform open-heart surgery on you without your feeling a thing. Among the items the Thai SEALs had abandoned in the course of their doomed oxygen tube mission were a number of oxygen compressors, which can pump pure oxygen into a dive tank. The Americans would ask the SEALs to begin filling tanks with as much pure oxygen as they could fit. The rationale was that if the boys’ systems could be saturated with oxygen, it might buy them more time in case a face mask flooded.

  The world record for what’s called static apnea—basically holding still in a pool for as long as possible on a single breath—is just under twelve minutes. The world record for static apnea in which a diver is allowed to breathe pure oxygen for up to half an hour before beginning a breath hold is twenty-four minutes. Twice as long—long enough to watch a full half-hour sitcom without commercials. Neither is a pleasant experience. After the first couple of minutes, as carbon dioxide builds up in your system, your body begins to alert you that it really wants you to breathe by issuing messages to your diaphragm to begin contractions. At first it can feel like a flutter in the belly, but the longer you hold your breath the more violent the flutters can be. After an hour’s session with free-diving guru Kirk Krack in 2012, I held my breath for five minutes. He explained that the trick is “riding the bronco” of contractions—knowing that it’s only pain—because your body can go for many minutes after those contractions begin.

  An unconscious person, however, is unable to ride the bronco and override the diaphragm’s demands, so the body might naturally try for a gulp of air. If one of the boys suffered a flooded face mask it would have meant breathing water and the onset of drowning. Humans typically lose their dive reflex at about six months (the famous cover of the grunge band Nirvana’s breakthrough album Nevermind, in which an infant is suspended a couple of feet deep in a pool, is an example of a baby displaying a dive reflex). The divers were hoping that somehow the boys’ brain stems would trigger a mammalian dive reflex, just as it had in the subjects in those studies of pinnipeds.

  Giving the boys almost pure oxygen would buy the divers a precious few minutes in the event of a flooded face mask; they could then race the drowning boys to the next chamber, where they might be able to revive them—this assumes that the divers even detected anything was wrong. It was a plan, all right, but it wasn’t pretty.

  Then there was the problem of how they would carry the boys. Some of the bigger and more experienced divers, like American Bruce Konefe, had to quit the search because they were simply too big to fit through the restriction after the sump at Chamber Three. There was another tight spot farther on that forced a diver to go upright, in a move that was like sliding behind a curtain. Agile cave divers could navigate that. Doing it while carrying fragile boys would be different. And while swimming in open water with the boys would not be particularly physically demanding, hauling an inert boy over dips and rises strewn with eons of rockfall and boulders would be.

  The planners decided to supply the Euro-divers with a flexible plastic stretcher called a Skedco, which wraps around a casualty like a taco. The Euro-divers would wait at prearranged locations in the cave—Chambers Seven, Six, and Five—load the boy into the Skedco, help the diver carry the litter to the next sump, and assist in refitting each boy with his mask and easing the diver into the water. Chamber Seven was about two hundred yards down from Chamber Eight; Chamber Six was to be located several hundred yards farther toward the entrance of the cave, after the diver would make his right-hand turn at the T-junction. Chamber Five, the final “gas station,” would follow about 250 yards later. After Chamber Five the rescuers would be on their own for the final four or five hundred yards to the waiting medics and rope systems at Chamber Three.

  “There were a lot of risks involved,” said Mallinson of their plan. It was the divers’ recommendation that “we ought to accept those risks.”

  They knew that resistance to such runaway risk at the outset would be significant, and that once the operation got under way there would be almost no tolerance for fatalities. But after all the ideas had been exhausted and the whiteboards cluttered, then wiped clean, then cluttered again, it was clear that this was the best shot they had to dive the boys out—and diving them out was the only way to save them.

  But though they had spent days devising the plan, until Josh Morris and Thanet walked into the American tent on July 6, their primary audience had been one another. As Morris and Thanet listened to the Americans talk, they both understood the plan and the care with which it had been drawn up. They also understood the terrible risks involved.

  Now they all just had to convince the pu’yais to green-light it.

  If a bomb had gone off in that room, it would have taken out a sizable portion of the Thai leadership. They were in the “big” war room at ranger headquarters, which had become the command center. It was 9 P.M. on July 6. For many in the room it had been a long day. They were all there: the interior minister, the King’s Guard officers, Governor Narongsak, his lieutenant governor, the generals, the SEAL rear admiral, the colonels, Morris and Thanet, the Americans. Anderson had brought in his ever-present whiteboard and surveys.

  It was hot and stuffy. About forty people were packed in, stacked up to the rear of the room with those with less seniority leaning against the back wall. Officers sweated in their uniforms. The conference table, which was actually a congress of several white-topped folding tables, had water bottles and eyeglass cases on it, but no phones. Interior
Minister Paochinda ordered complete secrecy. No recordings. No leaks. And yet moments earlier there had been another general fishing in pockets for phones with their various recording apps. This time it was less about ass-covering and more about posterity (a few photos and videos would eventually slip out).

  Major Hodges was seated to the immediate left of the interior minister, who despite the heat was wearing a dark jacket and black shirt. An interpreter sat in a chair between them, completing an intimate little triangle. Hodges started by urging everyone to leave emotion out of the planning. It was a difficult thing for the Thais in the room to do because their careers and livelihoods depended on success. Hodges told the minister, “The environment in the cave is working against us, with degraded oxygen levels and the waters that are coming in. The flow coming out of the cave is strong but stable.” He explained that they couldn’t get enough food into the cave. “All of these things tell us that we have got to do something right now.”

  When it was his turn to speak, Anderson was even more blunt: “We either have a shot, where we could get some of them out, or we leave ’em in there. And there’s a very, very high chance that none of them survive.”

  Diving sedated boys out through a mile of bone-chilling water had never before been contemplated, much less attempted; the optics caused significant discomfort among the leadership. Distilling the risk matrix his team had worked on, Hodges told the group there was a “very, very high level of risk and a very low probability of success.” Governor Narongsak then calmly asked the American major to define “success.”

  The answer: “If we bring back just one boy to his parents, I’d consider that a success.”

  Narongsak, who had helmed nearly every press conference and who had repeatedly assured the press and the world that all the boys would be home safely at some point, was now presented with the possibility of having to inform the world that some of the boys had not survived. The admiral listened unflinchingly. “He now understood,” Hodges later said.

  Most in the room now grasped that an immediate rescue operation was necessary, but the brass needed to hear how it would be done. Anderson, who was sitting at the other end of the long conference room, began briefing them—going through the plan they’d crafted over the last two days. At one point the interior minister stood up, grabbed a chair, and dragged it across part of the room to sit an arm’s length from Anderson. He waved off his translator and listened. When Anderson stood up to trace the route the rescuers would take, the minister also stood up; he peered closely at the hand-drawn sketches that had been meticulously annotated in English and Thai by Stanton’s girlfriend, Amp. The gallery of generals and bureaucrats sat stone-faced; given the intensity of the minister’s interest, it was clear the Americans and Brits were now the leadership’s grand viziers.

  They were at the zero hour, and yet even then there was pushback. After Anderson finished his presentation, a Thai official raised his hand and called for another analysis of the water conditions in the cave: “Why are we rushing into a rescue?” Others started raising hands, trying to press the interior minister; Major General Buncha, Josh Morris’s ally, put a stop to it. The interior minister instructed the military personnel to afford the international squad whatever support they required. He gave them the green light to continue planning and preparing the cave. The official go-ahead would have to wait until the prime minister decided on whether to proceed with the actual operation. There was one more thing: this Friday-night meeting was considered top secret. The interior minister ordered everyone that “This information must stay in this room.” He warned officials against leaking anything to the press. And nothing did leak.

  By forging ahead with the plan for a rescue dive, the interior minister—the highest-ranking public official in the room—had just stuck his head into a guillotine. A few dead boys could spell the end for him in a society where failure exacts a punishing toll. Almost every person who came out of the room that night considered his actions heroic.

  As the group disbanded, members of the King’s Guard and the interior minister asked Morris, Hodges, and Anderson to follow as they filed into a smaller side room. They asked them to do their brief again. A trio of Thai officials would transcribe it verbatim and relay it to the prime minister (and likely the king). “And we did the same exact brief again. And those scribes were writing down every word,” said Anderson.

  The minister told him: “Okay, that’s—that’s good. That’s the best plan that we’ve heard so far. Go ahead and start planning as if you’re going to effect this rescue.”

  It was decided that “stage one” would be the team’s code word for all the organization, prepping, planning, and practice runs they could get in before Sunday. “Stage two” was the real thing. Once that was set in motion and the divers dipped under the canopy of rock at Chamber Three, it would be nearly impossible to recall them. The pu’yais now knew that, and it was one of the reasons the mission’s traffic light was still at red and not at green.

  Given the preparation needed, the team told the pu’yais the rescue could begin on Sunday, July 8, at the earliest. It was Friday night, thirty-six hours before they hoped to send divers walking into the cave.

  The interior minister took it up with the prime minister. The royal guards relayed it to the palace. And the world, including the boys’ parents, knew nothing about it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  D-Day

  Saturday, July 7, dawned bright. As it does nearly every day at that time of year, the heat had settled and towering cumulonimbus clouds packed with moisture reared up. They released it sparingly, the rain mercifully measuring only a fraction of an inch. Outside the cave, microbes and fungi on the forest floor munched on plant litter and animal waste. Insects labored away, carrying food to dens. Ferns, thorns, and flowers stretched their leaves to welcome the abundant sun. So-called whistling ducks yammered in the new lakes created by the pumped outflow of water from the cave. Wild boars rooted around, and the indigenous mountain goats called gorals scrambled up the steepest slopes.

  At camp, it was not just any day. In a whirl of much-needed housekeeping, teams of workers began scurrying through the cave. Over the past two weeks, it had become a dump so littered with trip hazards that the Australian team’s biggest concern had switched from drowning to tripping—specifically, the danger of head injuries from falls on sharp rocks. Next came the possibility of electrocution. All those pumps, lights, jackhammers, air compressors, and Wi-Fi repeaters required electricity. Initially, workers used only what they had—domestic power cords, often stuck down with tape. Since many of the cables were installed piecemeal, at separate times by separate teams, the result was a rat’s nest of wires that ran from the mouth of the cave through several partially submerged tunnels and chambers to terminate about a thousand yards later in Chamber Three. Workers were routinely losing their footing on them.

  And while Chamber Three could communicate with the outside world, had ample food, and was populated by teams of international rescuers, it bore one striking resemblance to Chamber Nine, where the boys were. It stank. Rescuers had been pissing against the wall for weeks—maybe doing other things as well. There were discarded food wrappers everywhere.

  An Australian at the site joked that had this been in the U.S., the entire operation would have been shut down by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, soccer team be damned. But this was Thailand, and in the beginning local authorities threw whatever resources they had into the search; by now the full might of the SEALs, the regular army, and every politician was behind the rescue. So the workers tried to make sense of the wires, wrangle the miles of pump hoses, and generally organize the mess.

  Richard Harris and Craig Challen slipped past all that housekeeping for their initial dip into the chilly waters at Chamber Three, en route to their first visit to Chamber Nine.

  As it turned out, it would also be decision day for the boys. While Harris and Challen swam out to Chamber Nine, Dr. Bhak e
xplained to the boys that the pair of Australians who were coming needed an answer to the question of whether they wanted to wait out the monsoons or dive out. They excitedly answered that they were ready to leave. No one wanted to stay in that tomb. It was a good thing, too, because the doctors arrived with a message they might not have been fully authorized to deliver: You are going out tomorrow.

  In the dim light of Chamber Nine, the doctors examined the boys and quietly calculated how much sedative might be required. They found that some had symptoms of pneumonia, but they and their coach seemed otherwise relatively healthy, if rail thin. Key to the success of the operation would be the order in which the boys went out. The planners wanted the healthiest boys out first. A stretcher bearing a corpse would crush morale in camp. But the doctors felt that, given the boys’ state of relative health, they and their coach should decide. They told the boys to talk it over that night and decide on the extraction order. Before leaving, they had something to give them. On the same waterproof paper their sons had scribbled notes with little doodles of hearts to their families, their parents had written back.